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Nebulous Ottomans vs. Good Old Habsburgs: A Historiographical Comparison

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2017

Yasir Yılmaz
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Austrian History Yearbook , Volume 48 , April 2017 , pp. 173 - 190
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Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 2017 

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References

1 The idea of a global early modernity and connectivity inspired many studies in the last decade; see Aksan, Virginia H. and Goffman, Daniel, eds., The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire (Cambridge, 2007)Google Scholar; Casale, Giancarlo, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rothman, E. Natalie, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca, 2012)Google Scholar; Yaycıoğlu, Ali, Partners of the Empire: The Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (Stanford, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Readers interested in a broad overview of recent research trends and topics in Ottoman studies may see Aksan, Virginia H., “What's Up in Ottoman Studies?” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 1, no. 1–2 (2014): 3–21 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 A recent example is Anscombe, Frederick F., State, Faith, and Nation in Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Lands (New York, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On page 4, the author states that one of the main points of his narrative is the idea that “the Ottoman state retained an Islamic political identity from its beginning to its end.” The notion that ideological incompatibility propelled the history of Habsburg-Ottoman encounters was recently reiterated in Tracy, James D., “The Habsburg Monarchy in Conflict with the Ottoman Empire, 1527–1593: A Clash of Civilizations,” Austrian History Yearbook 46 (2015): 1–26 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Rhoads Murphey made a similar observation years ago, but his proposal that Ottomanists should give “equal consideration both to the spiritual and the material motives governing Ottoman behavior” appears to have gone unnoticed. Murphey, Rhoads, Ottoman Warfare, 1500–1700 (New Brunswick, 1999), 142CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Three articles by Hakan Karateke, Nabil Al-Tikriti, and Markus Dressler convincingly showed how the Ottoman court of different periods employed religious symbolism in political, legal, and military issues both for legitimization and in accordance with religious and ethical values. See the “Religiosity and Orthodoxy” section in Karateke, Hakan T. and Reinkowski, Maurus, eds., Legitimizing the Order: The Ottoman Rhetoric of State Power (Leiden, 2005), 109–73Google Scholar. A monumental work on the political use of Islamic rhetoric in the late Ottoman era is Karpat, Kemal, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (New York, 2001)Google Scholar. For a discussion of how the government made use of Islamic morals in education during Abdul Hamid II's (1876–1909) reign, see chapter 6 in Fortna, Benjamin C., Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State, and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire (New York, 2002)Google Scholar.

4 On the use of such reductionist paradigms to describe the Ottoman Empire, see the nuanced introduction in Goffman, Daniel, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Goffman cleverly debunked how a “Eurocentric mythologizing” shapes scholarly portrayals of the Ottoman Empire, but his fitting comments also appear to have made no impact on how Ottoman history is researched and written subsequently.

5 Deak, John, Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War (Stanford, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Judson, Pieter M., The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As far as the emphasis on the multitude of problems the monarchy faced is concerned, Fichtner's, Paula Sutter The Habsburgs: Dynasty, Culture and Politics (London, 2014)Google Scholar appears to have a relatively nuanced approach to the monarchy's history.

7 “European master narrative” refers to the progressive storyline in most world and western history textbooks that, in one way or another, sets the stage for eventual global superiority of Western European nation states in political, economic, cultural spheres.

8 I have elsewhere analyzed the progressive tone in the Anglophone Habsburg scholarship of the recent few decades: Yılmaz, Yasir, “‘Eurocentrism inside Europe’: Eurocentric Progressivism in Historiography of the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg Monarchy and Russian Tsardom,” in Eurocentrism at the Margins: Encounters, Critics and Going Beyond, ed. Sunar, Lütfi (Abingdon, 2016), 65–83 Google Scholar.

9 Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard and Kocka, Jürgen, “Comparison and Beyond: Traditions, Scope, and Perspectives of Comparative History,” in Comparative and Transnational History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives, ed. Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard and Kocka, Jürgen (New York, 2010), 5–6 Google Scholar.

10 When using the terms “monarchy” and “empire,” I follow the widely accepted norm in Habsburg historiography: I use the term “monarchy” to refer to the hereditary lands of the House of Habsburg in central and eastern Europe, whereas I use “empire” to refer to the lands of the Holy Roman Empire. Ingrao, Charles W., The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618–1815 (New York, 1994), xiiiGoogle Scholar.

11 Tezcan, Baki, The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World (New York, 2010), 10Google Scholar.

12 “Second Empire” is used in British, French, German, and Austrian historical contexts to refer to the beginning of a new sociopolitical and cultural era.

13 Abou-El-Haj, Rifaʻat Ali, Formation of the Modern State: The Ottoman Empire, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Albany, 1991)Google Scholar.

14 Ibid., 6.

15 Suraiya Faroqhi and Cornell Fleischer, introduction to Rifaʻat Ali Abou-El-Haj, Formation of the Modern State.

16 Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire.

17 Ibid., 5.

18 Ibid., 48.

19 Mikhail, Alan and Philliou, Christine M., “The Ottoman Empire and the Imperial Turn,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no. 4 (2012): 721–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Ibid., 723.

21 Marcus Koller, “‘Imperial Middle Ages?’ A Comparative Approach on Early Russian and Ottoman History” (presented at the Ottoman Conquest of the Balkans-Interpretations and Research Debates Conference, Institute für Osteuropäische Geschichte, University of Vienna, November 14, 2013).

22 Canbakal, Hulya, Society and Politics in an Ottoman Town: Ayntab in the 17th Century (Leiden, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilkins, Charles, Forging Urban Solidarities: Ottoman Aleppo, 1640–1700 (Leiden, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yi, Eunjeong, Guild Dynamics in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul: Fluidity and Leverage (Leiden, 2004)Google Scholar.

23 Quoting Uriel Heyd, Baki Tezcan argued that a decree dated June 1696 marked the establishment of the jurist's law as the supreme legal structure across the Ottoman realm after a century of struggle with kanun. Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire, 27. Literally meaning “law,” kanun referred in Ottoman parlance to pre-Islamic, Turkic-Mongolic governing traditions. In Ottoman sources, the term kanun is frequently used along with örf (commonly observed customs and manners). According to Halil İnacık, the Ottoman legal system was a combination of Islamic law on the one hand, and kanun and örf on the other. In practice, however, kanun and örf gained the upper hand against Islamic orthodoxy in the early Ottoman state. The two concepts granted sultans the authority to resolve any issue according to long-standing traditions when the dictates of Islamic law were not in favor of the state's stability. Kanun and örf’s preponderance over Islamic law was a peculiarity of the Ottoman legal system. For a survey of Ottoman law, see İnalcık, Halil, “Osmanli Hukukuna Giriş: Örfi-Sultani Hukuk ve Fatih'in Kanunları [Introduction to Ottoman law: Customary-sultanic law and the conquerer's law],” Ankara Üniversitesi Siyasal Bilgiler Fakültesi Dergisi 13, no. 2 (1958): 103–26Google Scholar. For a recent concise elaboration of the sources of law in the Ottoman Empire, see Ahmed's, Shahab posthumously published magnum opus What is Islam?: The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, 2016), 457–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An alternative survey is in Barkey, Karen, “Political Legitimacy and Islam in the Ottoman Empire: Lessons Learned,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 40, no. 4–5 (May 2014): 469–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Krstić, Tijana, “Illuminated by the Light of Islam and the Glory of the Ottoman Sultanate: Self-Narratives of Conversion to Islam in the Age of Confessionalization,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, no. 1 (2009): 35–63 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Krstić further developed her arguments in her Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Stanford, 2011)Google Scholar.

25 Terzioğlu, Derin, “Where ʻİlm-i Ḥāl Meets Catechism: Islamic Manuals of Religious Instruction in the Ottoman Empire in the Age of Confessionalization,” Past & Present 220, no. 1 (August 2013): 79–114 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 The so-called Ottoman version of confessionalization is also referred to as “Sunnitization,” because if one assumes that the Ottomans intentionally promoted the Sunni school of Islam in a global age of confessionalization, one should also assume that this effort mainly aimed at the elimination of the Safavid propaganda of the Shia school. Terzioğlu, “Where ʻİlm-i Ḥāl Meets Catechism,” 80.

27 Pfeiffer, Judith, “Confessional Polarization in the 17th-Century Ottoman Empire and Yūsuf İbn Ebī ʿAbdü’d-Deyyān's Keşfü’l-Esrār Fī Ilzāmi'l-Yehūd Ve'l-Aḥbār,” in Contacts and Controversies between Muslims, Jews and Christians in the Ottoman Empire and Pre-Modern Iran, ed. Adang, Camilla and Schmidtke, Sabine (Würzburg, 2010), 15–55 Google Scholar.

28 Burak, Guy, “Faith, Law and Empire in the Ottoman ‘Age of Confessionalization’ (Fifteenth–Seventeenth Centuries): The Case of ‘Renewal of Faith,’” Mediterranean Historical Review 28, no. 1 (2013): 1–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Mark David Baer's proposition that conversion is best understood within concentric contexts of war, conquest, and power relations also pre-echoed the hypotheses of the “renewal of faith” literature. In fact, Baer later rejected in a book review the broad application of the confessionalization theory to the Ottoman [and Safavid] contexts. Baer, Marc David, review of Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, by Krstić, Tijana, Journal of Islamic Studies 23, no. 3 (2012): 391–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, he used the concept of “turn to piety” to draw a similar conclusion by alluding to a purported Islamic reformism supported by the queen mother, grand vizier, and sultan. Baer argued that the pietistic Kadızadeli rhetoric was the driving force behind the policies of the early modern Ottoman court. Baer, Marc David, Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (New York, 2008), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Schulze, Reinhard, “Das Islamische achtzehnte Jahrhundert: Versuch einer historiographischen Kritik,” Die Welt des Islams 30, no. 1–4 (January 1990): 140–59Google Scholar.

30 Schulze, Reinhard, “Was ist die Islamische Aufklärung?” Die Welt des Islams 36, no. 3 (1996): 276–325 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Schulze, “Das Islamische achtzehnte Jahrhundert,” 144.

32 Peters, Rudolph, “Reinhard Schulze's Quest for an Islamic Enlightenment,” Die Welt des Islams 30, no. 1–4 (January 1990): 160–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Radtke, Bernd, “Erleuchtung und Aufklärung: Islamische Mystik und Europäischer Rationalismus,” Die Welt des Islams 34, no. 1 (April 1994): 48–66 Google Scholar; Hagen, Gottfried and Seidensticker, Tilman, “Reinhard Schulzes Hypothese einer islamischen Aufklärung: Kritik einer historiographischen Kritik,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 148 (1998): 83–110 Google Scholar.

33 For a historiographical survey, see Thomas A. Brady Jr., “Confessionalization: The Career of a Concept,” and Schilling, Heinz, “Confessionalization: Historical and Scholarly Perspectives of a Comparative and Interdisciplinary Paradigm,” both in Headley, John M., Hillerbrand, Hans J., and Papalas, Anthony J., eds., Confessionalization in Europe, 1555–1700: Essays in Honor and Memory of Bodo Nischan (Aldershot, 2004)Google Scholar.

34 Baer, review of Contested Conversions to Islam, 393.

35 Louthan, Howard, Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation (Cambridge, 2009)Google Scholar.

36 Bireley, Robert, Maximilian von Bayern, Adam Contzen S. J. und die Gegenreformation in Deutschland 1624–1635 (Göttingen, 1975)Google Scholar; Bireley, Robert, Religion and Politics in the Age of the Counterreformation: Emperor Ferdinand II, William Lamormaini, S. J., and the Formation of Imperial Policy (Chapel Hill, 1981)Google Scholar; Bireley, Robert, The Jesuits and the Thirty Years War: Kings, Courts, and Confessors (Cambridge, 2003)Google Scholar.

37 Gawthrop, Richard L., Pietism and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Prussia (Cambridge, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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39 Louthan, Howard, “Multiconfessionalism in Central Europe,” in A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World, ed. Safley, Thomas Max (Leiden, 2011), 369–92Google Scholar.

40 Lotz-Heumann, Ute and Pohlig, Matthias, “Confessionalization and Literature in the Empire, 1555–1700,” Central European History 40, no. 1 (2007): 35–61 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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42 Schulze, “Das Islamische achtzehnte Jahrhundert,” 147, 150–51.

43 Kafadar, Cemal, “Janissaries and Other Riffraff of Ottoman Istanbul: Rebels without a Cause?” in Identity and Identity Formation in the Ottoman World: A Volume of Essays in Memory of Norman Itzkowitz, ed. Tezcan, Baki and Barbir, Karl K. (Madison, 2008), 113–34Google Scholar. Linda Darling has indicated that Ottoman political advice literature, for instance, is well studied and historians have been able to establish patterns extending across eras. Nonetheless, research on advice literature has usually been confined to the topics of legitimation and ethics, disassociated from Ottoman political history and political institutions. Darling, Linda, “Political Change and Political Discourse in the Early Modern Mediterranean World,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 38, no. 4 (2008): 505–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Tapié, Victor Lucien, The Rise and Fall of the Habsburg Monarchy, trans. Hardman, Stephan (New York, 1971), 125Google Scholar; Ingrao, Charles W., In Quest and Crisis: Emperor Joseph I and the Habsburg Monarchy (West Lafayette, IN, 1979), 1Google Scholar; Spielman, John P., “Status as Commodity: The Habsburg Economy of Privilege,” in State and Society in Early Modern Austria, ed. Ingrao, Charles W. (West Lafayette, IN, 1994), 110–18Google Scholar.

45 Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618–1815, 3.

46 Ibid., 2.

47 Hazard, Paul, The European Mind, 1680–1715 (London, 1953)Google Scholar.

48 Evans, R. J. W., The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700: An Interpretation (Oxford, 1979)Google Scholar.

49 Two review articles published in a forum in honor of R. J. W. Evans in the Austrian History Yearbook in 2009 illustrated that many recent works in the field of Habsburg studies constitute a dialogue with the ideas in The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy; see Louthan, Howard, “Commentary: Making and Remaking the Habsburg Monarchy,” Austrian History Yearbook 40 (2009): 85–90 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Patrouch, Joseph F., “Commentary: The Making of Five Images of the Habsburg Monarchy: Before Nation There Was Agglutination,” Austrian History Yearbook 40 (2009): 91–98 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 The Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg monarchy were two different political entities. Yet each wrestled with similar challenges emanating from the multitude of political and cultural components that formed both states.

51 For the following brief analysis of Pufendorf, see von Aretin, Karl Otmar Freiherr, Das Alte Reich, 1648–1806, vol. 1: Föderalistische oder hierarchische Ordnung (1648–1684) (Stuttgart, 1993), 346–50Google Scholar; Wilson, Peter H., From Reich to Revolution: German History, 1558–1806 (New York, 2004), 305–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Whaley, Joachim, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, vol. 2: From the Peace of Westphalia to the Dissolution of the Reich, 1648–1806 (Oxford, 2012), 95–102 Google Scholar.

52 Freiherr von Aretin, Das Alte Reich, 1648–1806, 347.

53 Ibid., 347–48.

54 Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, 96–97.

55 Ibid., 97.

56 Wilson, From Reich to Revolution, 306.

57 Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, 96; Wilson, From Reich to Revolution, 306. Regarding “positive assessment” of the Holy Roman Empire, see also Wilson, Peter H., “Still a Monstrosity? Some Reflections on Early Modern German Statehood,” Historical Journal 49, no. 2 (2006): 565–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Redlich, Oswald, Weltmacht des Barock: Österreich in der Zeit Kaiser Leopolds I. (Vienna, 1961)Google Scholar; Redlich, Oswald, Das Werden einer Grossmacht: Österreich von 1700 bis 1740 (Vienna, 1962)Google Scholar.

59 Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700, xiii.

60 Redlich, Weltmacht des Barock, 3.

61 Ibid., 5.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid., 5, 11–12, 483.

64 Hantsch, Hugo, Die Geschichte Osterreichs, vol. 2: 1648–1918 (Graz, 1962), 11Google Scholar.

65 Ibid., 59–69.

66 Novotny, Alexander, “Oswald Redlichs Bedeutung für die neuere Geschichte Österreichs,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 68 (1960): 546–52Google Scholar. Ficker was one of the parties in the Sybel-Ficker debate with German historian Heinrich von Sybel about the nineteenth-century question of “großdeutsche-Lösung” vs. “kleindeutsche-Lösung,” and he had argued for a “Greater Germany.” Also, promoted by the Austrian Empire, this perspective favored multiethnicity as the natural, thus best structural successor of the old Reich for the good of Germans and other peoples in Central Europe.

67 For the following brief section on Hugo Hantsch, see Kann, Robert A., “Hugo Hantsch, 1895–1972,” Central European History 5, no. 3 (1972): 284–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 Wandruszka, Adam, The House of Habsburg: Six Hundred Years of a European Dynasty, trans. Epstein, Cathleen and Epstein, Hans (Garden City, NY, 1964), 74, 111–12Google Scholar.

69 Zöllner, Erich, Geschichte Österreichs: Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (München, 1961)Google Scholar.

70 Ibid., 221. The emphasis is mine.

71 Ibid., 246. Zöllner's seventh chapter is titled “Österreichs Aufstieg zur Grossmacht (1648–1740).”

72 Ibid., see especially 275–303.

73 Two examples, among many others, are Press, Volker, “Die Erblande und das Reich von Albrecht II. bis Karl VI. (1438–1740),” in Deutschland und Österreich, ed. Kann, Robert A. and Prinz, Friedrich E. (Vienna, 1980), 44–88 Google Scholar; and Winkelbauer, Thomas, Ständefreiheit und Fürstenmacht: Länder und Untertanen des Hauses Habsburg im konfessionellen Zeitalter, vol. 1 (Vienna, 2003), 397–98Google Scholar.

74 Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700, 447.

75 Tapié, The Rise and Fall of the Habsburg Monarchy, 131.

76 Ibid., 137.

77 Bérenger, Jean, A History of the Habsburg Empire, trans. Simpson, C. A. (London, 1994), 338Google Scholar.

78 El-Rouayheb, Khaled, Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb (New York, 2015), 8–9 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

79 There is a general scarcity of comparative approaches to the Habsburg empire that may be attributed to the very theme I discussed in this article, namely, the positive approach of Anglophone scholarship to the Habsburg state. Tara Zahra noted in a 2013 forum on German History that the Habsburg monarchy “never had the hierarchical relationships of domination or economic exploitation that generally characterized overseas empires.” See Zahra's answer to the second question in Evans, R. J. W. et al. , “Forum: Habsburg History,” German History 31, no. 2 (2013): 225–38Google Scholar.